the sea is watching is the fifth and final part of the Borders series. The work takes its point of departure from philosopher Catherine Malabou’s observation that “political violence more and more wears the mask of meaningless accidents.” The piece questions how we perceive—geographically, politically, and emotionally—what lies at the edge of visibility.

 

The installation evokes a fragile visual landscape: large-scale prints on newsprint are mounted in a way that allows them to respond to the smallest shifts in the room. As visitors move through the space, air circulation causes the prints to sway slightly—a work in constant crisis, never fully at rest.

 

The horizon, both as visual motif and conceptual anchor, plays a central role. Referencing Hito Steyerl’s notion of the collapse of linear perspective, the horizon here is fractured, disoriented. The viewer is denied a fixed vantage point. Instead, multiple perspectives emerge—overlapping, dissolving, contradicting.

 

Text is projected onto the images—words that hover at the border of clarity and opacity, questioning the limits of language, and suggesting that meaning often circulates at the edge of the sayable.

 

In this work, the border is not only a geographic or political construct, but also emotional and perceptual: a border between visibility and disappearance, between memory and forgetting, between passivity and agency. Yet, amid this dissolution, the sea is watching creates a shared space—delicate and unstable—where text, image, and viewer co-exist.

 

The work has been exhibited at Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg.